Petr Kofroň

Petr Kofroň is a Czech composer, born in Prague on 15 August 1955. His training and his work promoting contemporary music in the former Czechoslovakia make him a significant figure in the country's avant-garde in the final decades of the twentieth century.

He studied in Prague with Kopelent, then went on to the Janáček Academy in Brno between 1974 and 1979, where his teacher was Piňos. In 1983 he founded the ensemble Agon, devoted to contemporary music and the first of its kind in the former Czechoslovakia, which he has continued to direct ever since. He was a co-founder of the Czech Society for New Music and, in 1989, took over as editor of the specialist journal Konzerva/Na Hudbu.

His aesthetic development passes through several stages. After conceptual works around 1970, focused on restrictive environments and the movement of sound in space, he returned in 1976 to elementary diatonic harmony. He showed a particular interest in the music of Isaak Dunayevsky. From 1983 he was influenced by the hermetic philosophy of Aleister Crowley and by ritual-based composition, and six years later his music shifted towards an aggressive style that prioritises the interaction and energy of performers and sounds over conventional musical parameters. He is also interested in graphic notation, and has performed works by other authors in that idiom, among them Ponc, Logothetis and Knížák.

His works include the opera Zlaté kapradí (1991), orchestral pieces such as Luk (1979–81) and Liber LXXII (1987), and numerous chamber compositions, such as Spira (1990) and Abram (1994). His scores are held at the Czech Music Fund (Český hudební fond), and his principal publishers are Panton and Společnost pro Novou Hudbu. As a writer, he has published Třináct analýz (1993) and Grafické partitury a koncepty (1996).